The Rose Petal Beach (17 page)

‘Tami, where were you?’ Scott asks.

‘At the police station,’ I say on the crest of a sigh as I lower the glass from my lips. His eyes alight on the glass but he says nothing. Then his eyes alight on my ring finger. It is missing its ring. I took it off this afternoon. Affair or attack, there was no way I could stay married to him now.

‘Why were you at the police station?’ he asks.

‘They saw me walking down the road and asked me to come in for a chat. They wanted me to verify your story for the night in question, among other things.’

‘And did you?’

‘How could I verify your story when you have no story except she’s out to get you but it’ll all go away so you don’t need a solicitor?’

‘Right. Right.’

‘But it was super fun to be questioned about our sex life and your porn habit. I think I’m going to ask to have that happen again and again.’

‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ he says, quietly.

‘Are you, are you really? Or is that simply something for you to say in this situation?’

‘Tami, if I had known it would turn out like this … I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.’

I rest my head back, close my eyes. I would love to feel the sun on my face, I would love for it to warm me up. I would love for it to make me believe that he couldn’t have done this thing, I would love for it to burn away the images my husband’s porn has put into my mind.

‘Did they … Did they give you any idea of where they are with their investigation?’

‘No, but they seem to be looking at this from all angles. From
the way they were acting, I think they may have some proof.’

‘How can they have proof when it didn’t happen?’ he asks.

‘I’m only telling you what I thought after the conversation.’

‘
I’m not telling you I have seen that act carried out on one of your films, nor that I know the date now so it could all be verified.
’

‘Do you think I did it?’ he asks.

My eyes fly open. I stare up at the ceiling, a bright white that hasn’t been coated with deposits from food condensation.

‘Your silence speaks volumes,’ he says after a while, his hurt evident.

‘What is it that you want from me, Scott?’ I continue to stare up, to wonder how I can escape into the world up there. ‘The best-case scenario right now is that you were cheating on me. That’s the very best-case scenario.’

‘That doesn’t answer the question. Do you think I did it?’

‘No. No, I don’t think you did it.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do think you did it.’

‘Well, at least I know where I stand,’ he says. The sound of wood on tile fills the air as he stands. ‘I didn’t want to do this,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to show you these and I didn’t think I’d have to because you’d believe me. But here. Proof of what I’m saying. Proof that we were … together.’ The clatter of his BlackBerry on the wooden table. ‘They’re in the saved messages folder. I’m sorry for what you’re about to read. It’s not … I’m sorry.’

He leaves me then. He leaves me alone to go through another life-changing agony.

7 January 2012
I love you. I have never loved anyone like I love you. Why can’t you see that? M x

21 January
I’m not asking you to leave the three of them behind, I would never ask that of you, I just want more of you. Is that too much to ask? M x

4 February
I can still taste you. M x

7 February
I can still feel your fingers inside me. M x

15 February
I would never look at anyone else. Why can’t you understand that? I’m yours. Always. M x

15 February
Always. M x

25 February
Please stop saying that. It’s you that I love. It’s you that I want. M x

1 March
Of course I want us to be together, but I’m not going to ask you to leave. I’ve left before, it’s a horrible thing to do, I’d never ask another person to do that. Not even you. M x

3 March
Do you know what I was thinking about today? Our first kiss. I could actually feel your lips on mine, the way you gently bit my bottom lip. Pleasure and pain, wasn’t that what you said? You’re pure pleasure, no pain. M x

6 March
You tasted incredible yesterday. I just wanted you to know that. M x

9 March
You’re mine. Don’t care what you say, you’re mine. I’ll fight to keep you. M x

15 March
I’ve never been fucked like that before. No one who fucks me like that will ever be out of my life. M x

20 March
I know it’s wrong but I can’t help feeling how I do. I know you’re married, but I’m willing to wait. I’d wait a lifetime for you to be ready to be with me properly. It’ll cause a lot of hurt, and I’m not proud of that, but I love you. M x

I keep checking back, I keep calling up her number on my phone and it’s hers. It’s hers. She sent these little notelets of love and lust and sex. To Scott. To my husband.

My husband was having an affair with my best friend. They were in love. She was trying to get him to leave me.

My best friend was having an affair with my husband. They were in love. He fucked her like she’d never been fucked before.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

My husband and my best friend were having an affair.

I have to keep saying it until I can believe it.

I want to go for a run. I want the unyielding ground beneath my trainer-covered feet as I pound it with all the strength I have in my legs, and I want the wind, usually strong and unforgiving on the seafront, to slam into me, clearing my head and freeing my body.

I want to feel each knot of anxiety untwisting itself as I run down the streets to the seafront, then run on with the Pier in my sights, then the hills of Rottingdean as my destination and then keep on running to whatever lays beyond. I have only run to the Marina before, then turned back to run the 10km to Shoreham Lighthouse. Today, I want to run and run and not turn back. I want to keep going until my body collapses, until the physical pain erases all the emotional agony that is excavating my heart.

Instead, I walk around my office, trying to tidy up. My office was once the smallest bedroom on the first floor, but now it is my space. It has a huge noticeboard that takes up one wall, upon which are newspaper cuttings, postcards, images I like, font examples, a timetable and deadlines of work that is to be done and pictures of my family. On my desk are piles of mess: unopened trade magazines, invoices I have produced but not posted, letters – probably some containing cheques – and ordinary post. Things that I have been mentally brushing aside to get through the last few days.

My body aches with the loss of running from my life. My limbs are cold and barely responsive, my torso feels solid and leaden, my head is a mass of cotton wool. Physically, I am like a classic car kept on the driveway that is stiffening, seizing up because it hasn’t been taken out for a long drive that will blow away the cobwebs,
will encourage the parts to work as they are lubricated, oiled and forced to move.

My husband has been having an affair with my best friend.

That is why I want to run. I want to escape from all of this.

However, fear and shame and gossip are holding me hostage in my house. We are being studied, scrutinised, observed. Those who saw Mr Challey being carted off are probably waiting for the next instalment. The voices of a dozen whispers – speculating, wondering, condemning – are deafening in the still of the street. I’m not sure how it doesn’t bother Scott, when he is now so obsessed with the outward appearance of things, but it doesn’t. He’s taken the girls to school today and is going to drop into his office to pick up a few files. He told me this when the girls were there so I wouldn’t tell him to fuck off, speaking to me like everything was normal. To stop behaving as if anything could be all right between us ever again.

The gossip bothers me. It bothers me enough to stop me running and to have me doing this necessary clear-out of my workspace. It bothers me that people might have seen him going into her house and thought it odd. It bothers me that people out there might have known what was going on and looked at me pityingly. Tami Challey, the pathetic wife who knew nothing.

DING-DONG! KNOCK-KNOCK! Then the metallic creak of the letterbox, followed by a call of ‘Hell-oooh!’

Beatrix.

She’s on her second ‘Hell-oooh!’ as I run down the corridor, down the stairs to the front door. I snatch it open before she’s had a chance to straighten up and she almost falls through the door, barrelling into me. I stumble backwards, but manage to keep my balance. I throw myself at her, forcing her to take me in her arms.

‘I take it you’re pleased to see me, then,’ she says, as I practically swamp her slender frame.

‘You have no idea,’ I say.

‘Oh dear,’ she replies. ‘This doesn’t sound good. Come on, cup of char and a sit down then you can tell me everything.’

Instead of letting her go and walking through to the kitchen, I hang onto my friend. She’s the one sane person in this whole mess. It takes seconds to soak through her shoulder and she doesn’t even complain.

‘This is horrific,’ she says. ‘My goodness, Tami, it’s a wonder you’re still standing. You should have called me.’

I shake my head. ‘What could you have done?’

‘Lots of things,’ she replies. ‘Look at my shoulder, for instance, it’s perfect for soaking up tears. And I could have had the girls for sleepovers so you could talk to him. Where is he, by the way?’

‘Work, picking up files.’

‘At a time like this? When he should be here trying to talk to you?’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ll tell you what else I could have done, I could have warned off her ladyship.’

‘I don’t want that,’ I say. ‘And, if there’s any warning off to be done, I’ll do it. There’s no need for you to fall out with her, too.’

Her green eyes bulge out of her head. ‘No need to fall out with her?’ she shrieks, but quietly as if there is someone in the house. ‘She’s practically ruined your family. There’s every need to fall out with her. I can’t think of a time when there’s ever been more of a need to fall out with someone.’

My mouth curls upwards in a smile of sorts, I feel so heavy and sad. Bereaved, almost. ‘Scott did that,’ I say to her. ‘He’s ruined this family. Whatever’s gone on, it’s all down to the choices that Scott’s made.’

‘I hear you.’ Beatrix reaches her arms across the table and carefully wraps her long slender hands over my hands. ‘I totally understand.’

I’m not sure I do, to be honest,
I think as I watch her hands. Her fingers are about two-thirds the width of mine so her hands are smaller, narrower. It seems odd to get comfort from someone who seems so much less substantial than me.

‘What do you think happened then?’ she asks, picking up her
mug and tipping it to take a sip. She’s doing that to avoid making direct eye contact but still watching me and my reactions.

‘I don’t know what I think any more,’ I say to Beatrix. ‘This whole thing is trashing my life. I keep thinking that I don’t deserve this.’ Or do I? Is this the price I pay for not listening to my parents? Is this what I deserve for marrying someone from a ‘bad’ family who none of my family approved of, and for not going to university, and for not staying in London, and for taking pride in having gorgeous children who are the light of my life? Is this what happens when you think you know best and try to live your life as you please? You’re forced to live with the consequences, as huge or insignificant as they may be. In this case, those consequences are ginormous-antic, as Anansy would say. They are so huge they blot out the solar system, the stars he once wrote my name in.

Beatrix nods sadly. ‘I know what you mean,’ she says. ‘When my husband left after giving me the old “I love you but I’m not in love with you” speech which was actually a lie, he was simply shagging some
whore
– I mean, someone else – I wished more than anything that I could have another reason for the end of my marriage. I wanted him to have had a knock on the head so he wasn’t himself, or something, anything that would mean the man I knew and loved wouldn’t be capable of cheating on me and then leaving.’

‘I hate him for what he’s done to me,’ I confess. ‘I hate both of them for what they’ve done. Sometimes I get so angry about it all, I swear I could kill them both with my bare hands.’

Beatrix nods. ‘I felt like that, too. It’s all normal. When my husband decided to come back for a while because he thought we could make things work – in other words his whore got cold feet about leaving her husband so he panicked – I remember wishing as I was making him dinner one night that I had time to grind up some glass and mix it in his food. I was being the perfect wife, you know, so that he wouldn’t leave me again, but I still had these flashes of intense hatred and anger where I could have murdered him. So I get what you’re saying, totally.’

It’s hard to think of Beatrix as someone who would feel such rage. She’s always been so calm and fun, she fills her world with dating and fine wine, yoga and zumba, Pilates and football. Her existence is the perfect balance of the single life interspersed with a taste of family life with us, which I think she must sometimes crave from the way she looks so hungrily at the girls. Plus she lives in her huge flat she has decorated exactly as she’s wanted. No ugly fireplaces for her. It’s difficult to imagine her having thoughts as murderous as mine have been over the past few hours.